


unwinged

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [9]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Dissection, Dissociation, Eldritch Fuckery, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Immortality, Knives, Mad Scientists, Mechanization, Mechtober, Medical Procedures, Murder, Ritual Sacrifice, Self-Harm, Suicide, Violence, Whumptober 2020, alarmed that THAT'S a tag, i am forcibly removed from the premises, i arrive at whumptober day 9, me sprinkling every raph mechanization theory into a melting pot of evil, prose: purple. science officer: mechanized. internal organs: out, scalpels, she gets better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:42:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26926057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: The blood slows to an occasional drip at last, and Raphaella closes her eyes, plants her feet on the floor, and drags herself up from her lab stool.(Whumptober Day 9: ritual sacrifice; Mechtober Day 7-9: tree)
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 13
Kudos: 48
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	unwinged

**Author's Note:**

> hello! please read the tags! this includes graphic human dissection and (temporary) suicide.

The blood slows to an occasional drip at last, and Raphaella closes her eyes, plants her feet on the floor, and drags herself up from her lab stool.

She tells herself, for at least the thirteenth time, that the first step was the hardest. Killing isn’t new to her—she’s had plenty of practice with her test subjects over the years, first animals and then people, prisoners and thieves and anyone who wouldn’t be missed and was, simultaneously, foolish enough to wander too close to her lab. But most of the time, the deaths were closer to euthanasia than murder. If hands-on, cold-blooded killing was the one aspect of her preparations that she neglected, she figures it should be smooth sailing from here on out.

Restraining them had been the hardest. Ambrosi had trusted her until this morning, but they’re not a particularly small person, and even the strength training that Raphaella’s been doing in preparation for her new wings had barely been enough to tackle them onto the table and strap them down. She really should’ve found some way to talk them into taking a sedative, but—no, this is all part of it. They have to suffer at her hands. The design of her exam table made it relatively easy to slash their wrists and let the blood flow into a collecting tank at the bottom, while she gave herself the time to rest and, to her own chagrin, watch.

By now, they’ve been dead for several minutes. Raphaella rests a hand on their chest, gauging the lingering warmth in their skin before glancing at the table behind herself one more time. She won’t have much time to waste once she begins her work, so everything needs to be in its place. The wings are where she left them—spread out and glistening on the table, ready to plug in to the ports that she installed on her back the week before. Even thinking about them makes the scar tissue between her shoulder blades tense up. Gods, how she misses the sky.

That’s why she’s doing this, she reminds herself. To see the sky again. To leave this forsaken planet. It’s not like Ambrosi ever could have come with her.

With the tray of surgical implements at her side, Raphaella begins.

After she cuts their shirt away, the first few incisions are difficult as always; even for someone as experienced as her, it takes a few tries to get the hang of the specific strength of human skin, and she has to trace the lines more than once before she actually cuts all the way through the dermis. One cut under the collarbones, then down the center of their chest, to another below their belly, and she digs in with her fingers to peel the skin back from the muscles beneath. With such a fresh corpse, it’s not hard to pull the connective tissue away. The shining mass of freshly-bled muscle overwhelms her for a second, until she leans back a few inches and takes a deep breath. Frankly, the tang of blood is far better than the sickly reek of formaldehyde from her university days.

The pectorals carve smoothly under the blade of her scalpel, and she peels them back on each side, revealing the smooth curve of their ribs. She remembers how it felt to be tucked up against those ribs, coming home from a late night in the lab, their arm slung over her shoulder. Yellow patches of fat dapple the muscles between the bones, like clouds hanging low in the sky, stretched and molded to the shape their body once took. Raphaella cuts down through the serratus and removes it, then begins slicing at the intercostals to make room for her pruning shears. Once the muscles are cut, making a haphazard dashed line, she wedges the shears under their left second rib and snaps it.

She falls into a rhythm as she snaps their ribs, letting her mind drift away from the sound and to the familiar recounting of her next steps. Ribs, pleura, lungs. She’s not even entirely sure what she’s looking for, except that she’ll know it when she sees it. That’s what matters. By the time the ribs are cut, her hands are shaking from fatigue, and she has to lay the shears down for a moment to stretch out her cramping fingers. Thankfully, she shouldn’t have to cut any more bone, unless something goes very wrong.

The few vessels connecting Ambrosi’s ribcage to their chest cavity don’t bleed when she severs them, and she sets the ribs aside. It never fails to surprise her how few layers stand between her questing fingers and a human heart, but it strikes her harder now, because this is a heart that she knows—this is a heart that she’s listened to, ear pressed against their chest and eyes closed as she narrowed her focus to the steady beat of their existence. Its stillness deafens her now. Instead of granting it any attention, she pulls their right lung away from the pericardium, picking up her scalpel again to tease apart the places where the connective tissue has adhered. She bites her lip before cutting through the pulmonary vessels, then relaxes when they only release a trickle of blood.

Turning back to her tray, Raphaella selects a larger blade to cut through the lung lengthwise, then separates the halves and drapes them across the half-empty chest cavity. This part takes her breath away every time; there’s something about the disconnect between microscopic capillaries and individual molecules of oxygen, compared to the solid thickness of the entire bronchi. Her finger traces the end of the trachea, bump-bump-bump across the rings of cartilage, then slips into the hollow of one branch and follows it until it’s too small to fit her fingertip anymore. She imagines climbing those branches, scrambling up and out until the swaying spindles of wood can’t support her weight anymore, and crashing back down to earth. Ambrosi loved climbing trees when they were kids. Raphaella was always the one to fall, especially after she lost her wings.

She  _ really  _ doesn’t have time for these thoughts.

The lungs don’t contain what she’s looking for, so she places the right one aside and cuts out the left to set next to it. On to the heart, then. Logically. She snips through the pericardium, peels it back, and leans in close to examine the heart itself. It’s odd to her, how long humans can evolve and still be so… lopsided. There must be something perfect about mismatched halves and asymmetry, but Raphaella doesn’t understand it, though she figures she doesn’t need to.

She won’t try to cut out their heart, because she knows there will be plenty of blood left in the aorta, but she does probe between the chambers and examine them for anything unusual. Still nothing. It’s only when she heaves a sigh and starts to pull back that she notices something shimmering in the hollow where the left lung sat minutes before.

At first, she dismisses it as the reflection of the overhead lights against the body wall, but then it glints again, distinctly multicolored this time, and she stops moving. It can’t possibly be a trick of the light. She’s dissected dozens of people, and while the structures in their backs are more varied than the rest of the bodies, none of them have been  _ rainbow.  _ This must be it, then.

Raphaella picks up a small flashlight from her tray and shines it inside, revealing something squamous attached to the intercostals. It’s not where she expected to find it, but then—she traces the crosshatched muscles up, around, and realizes that she’s looking at the source of the long fiber connecting Amrbosi’s wing to their back, and everything makes sense. It feels like a cosmic mockery, but  _ she’s  _ the one who chose to give herself wings, after all.

To give them back. Like she deserves.

Not daring to bring the scalpel anywhere near the shimmering thing, Raphaella pokes at it a few times with blunt forceps before grabbing the edge and pulling it away from the ribs. She expected it to squirm, to  _ struggle,  _ and instead she’s almost unmoored by its patience. Then again, it has all the time in the universe, and so will she.

One last deep breath, to calm her nerves.

Raphaella swallows the squamous thing whole, feeling how it awakens in her throat and struggles, thrashes, squeals. That’s more in line with her expectations, at least. She drops the forceps and the flashlight with a clatter, then reaches for her scalpel, not bothering to wipe it off. Even after all her preparations, she doesn’t know her own limits all that well, since she couldn’t exactly test how long it would take her to bleed out, so she steps up to the edge of the blood tank before gouging deep into her forearm with the blade.

It hurts. That’s no surprise. It drowns out the horrible squirming in her chest, and under that, the empty fuzz growing in her head; it pulses and spreads from her arm like arcing electricity as she leans down and shoves her wrist into the tank, watching the surface of the slowly-congealing blood waver at her touch. She counts one, two, three, then pulls her arm out again and shakes it off. There’s no way of telling if she got enough of Ambrosi’s blood in her own system for the sacrifice to  _ stick,  _ but if the squamous thing was there, then she already did something right. Instead of worrying about it, she staggers back to the table where her wings await—all she has to do is lie down, let them sink into the ports on her back, and wait for the nanobots to do their work.

She cuts her shirt away with the scalpel still in her hand, knowing that she’ll get tangled in it if she tries to pull it over her head, and when she slices her chest on accident, well, that’ll just speed things along. The floor is a slippery mess of blood, shot through with occasional pulses of rainbow. Her head feels cushioned by clouds that prick behind her eyes like icicles. She squeezes her elbow, pressing down toward her wrist, draining herself of blood, wondering if she should’ve gone for her jugular instead just to shorten these moments where she has to bleed out alone.

They are the longest moments of her life.

Finally, when she feels herself starting to black out, Raphaella swings her legs up onto the table and lies down. She’s not sure if she’s conscious enough to feel the wings settle into place, but that question is answered as soon as they connect, because the dull throb of blood leaving her body is replaced all at once by blinding-hot pain that radiates from her back and knocks her unconscious within seconds.

She dreams of Ambrosi, of course.

When Raphaella wakes up, half-naked and covered in dried blood, it takes her nearly half an hour to pull herself up from the table with the added weight of the new wings on her back, but she’s alive. Her hands tremble, her throat is raw, her feet slide on the ground and send her crashing down into the mess of blood and grime, but she’s alive.

Nothing in her millennia of existence will make her regret that.

**Author's Note:**

> Did y'all know that you can just watch videos of human dissection on the internet? Somehow I didn't! I haven't dissected anything in a couple years, so I had to do more research than I normally would've (though thankfully my anatomy knowledge is still fairly accurate). Love me a good rabbit hole.
> 
> I'm in a HeadSpace TM after writing this so I'm not sure what else to put here! If egregious gore is your thing, a) same hat and b) hopefully you enjoyed this! I tried really hard to be subtle about Raph Having Feelings while also making it clear that she Has Feelings and is Not About It, but uhhh work was long and exhausting today and I am running on like 2 brain cells. Please comment? Validation? Please? You don't have to, of course, but it really makes me so so happy. (especially those of you who, like, comment on every single thing I post multiple times? I am tenderly kissing you on the face right now. I love you so much.)
> 
> find me on tumblr @alderations for content that is uhhh usually much more tame than this
> 
> ETA: I googled “gender neutral Italian names” and the FIRST ONE that came up said it meant “immortality” so I just ran with it. >:3c


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